Valerie A. Martinez was reading historian Leisa Meyer's book, “Creating G.I. Jane,” about the inception of the Women's Army Corps during World War II, when she first learned of the Benito Juárez Squadron.

It was a line in a book that might as well have been a lightning rod.

It sparked the young scholar's quest to examine the Mexican American WACs unit inducted at Municipal Auditorium in the spring of 1944.

Apparently, it was quite a show.

Generals of the Southern Defense Command and Army Air Forces Flying Training Command were there. So was the acting mayor of San Antonio, the mayor of Monterey, Mexico, and Nuevo Leon's secretary of state.

The Randolph Field band played Latin American music, and a newsreel cameraman grabbed footage. Future first lady Mamie Eisenhower sent a note calling it “an auspicious occasion,” and a newspaper account said thousands attended.

The Latinas who became “Bee-Jays,” the squadron's nickname, marched in. One of them, Mercedes Ledesma, wore her late husband's Purple Heart.

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All this comes mostly from newspaper accounts. That's all Martinez has.

The historical record has little to show for a cadre of Mexican American women who joined the war effort like their white counterparts, as typists and stenographers, but who were nonetheless trailblazers.

“It's all new ground,” says Martinez, a 20th-century Americanist on the last leg of a doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin. “It's exactly why I love this project.”

It's also incredibly challenging. As far as Martinez can tell, none wrote their stories or recorded oral histories. And she has so many questions.

Because historians have started filling in the blanks about the U.S. Mexican American experience, the contributions of Latinos have been recorded.

We know that such men weren't just patriotic and asserting their Americanism in the war, they also wanted “first-class citizenship” and their civil rights.

Latinas probably answered the call for similar reasons. But Martinez thinks their service also might have been about seeking “more control over their lives, their bodies and their sexuality.”

Hers is an extraordinary supposition.

Martinez thinks that even in an institution like the military, with so many controls, these women might have experienced far more freedom than at home, given the societal restrictions in traditional Mexican American families.

She'd like to gauge the significance of military service on these women's lives and that of their descendants. Did the Mexican Revolution impact the lives of their parents in ways that made them seek such opportunities?

In turn, did their military service open avenues for their children?

Whose idea was it to name the unit for a beloved Mexican president, the first with indigenous roots, who has been compared to Abraham Lincoln and Simon Bolivar?

“It means something that they chose Benito Juárez,” Martinez says.

The Bee-Jays never signed up the 200 women it set out to recruit.

Those who served were described as “pretty San Antonians” and “proverbial bees as they work for victory.”